desecrations? 373Chinese culture at large and their historical context, since “Western”
and “Chinese” usage may differ substantially in this respect. But this
issue lies outside the scope of the present inquiry.
Language UsageThe making of the poem brings us to the issue of language usage. In
chapters Two and Seven we have seen that as poets, Han Dong and
Yu Jian are best known for their employment of so-called colloquial
language, as opposed to formal or bookish language, and that they
are often referred to as Colloquial poets, even if this label represents
a simplification of their art. In the interview with Liu and Zhu, Han
Dong says:^19
The basic language of my poetry is the modern Chinese spoken lan-
guage... Of course, you can’t say my language is the exact same thing
as everyday conversation, but its fountainhead clearly lies in the spoken
language... If our language were the result of inbreeding within the
written language, it would progressively lose its usability, wither and be-
come insipid and move toward extinction...Yu Jian, too, has commented at length on the virtues of the collo-
quial. He links the opposition of formal versus colloquial language on
the one hand with an opposition of the Standard Language versus
regional languages (᱂䗮䆱 versus ᮍ㿔, usually translated as Modern
Standard Chinese and dialect)^20 and an opposition of the North versus the
South, on the other. This passage comes from the opening paragraph
of “The Hard and Soft of the Tongue of Poetry: On Two Different
Directions in the Language of Contemporary Poetry” (䆫℠П㟠ⱘ⹀
Ϣ䕃: ݇Ѣᔧҷ䆫℠ⱘϸ㉏䇁㿔ᑺ, 1998):^21
Especially in the South, the Standard Language may have effectively
made its way into the written language, but it has never thoroughly done
so for the spoken language. Dialect is always capable of effectively dis-
pelling the Standard Language: indeed, this has become an everyday
language game among people... The Standard Language has hardened(^19) Han & Liu & Zhu 1994: 119.
(^20) Regional language is the preferred scholarly translation of ᮍ㿔. Hereafter I ren-
der it as dialect to situate the issue within the popular socio-political and cultural dis-
course of which it is a part and to avoid using language in the translation of both
terms, which Yu employs contrastively.
(^21) Yu Jian 1998a: 1. Cf Inwood 2008: 218-224.